Hydrated Minerals at Lyot Crater

The Minister normally doesn't write about Mars here at MinSEx, as he does so at one of his other blogs, Areology. However, the Minister has a plethora of potential stories to write about with regard to Mars and stories about the rest of the universe are more scarce at the moment. So he will switch gears for today and invite his readers, if they have any interest in the planet Mars, to join him at Areology.

Lyot Crater, pictured here, is one of at least nine craters in the northern lowlands of Mars with exposures of hydrated minerals detected from orbit, according to a June 25, 2010, report.

These minerals, including phyllosilicates, have previously been found in thousands of small outcrops in the southern highlands of Mars, but had not previously been identified in the northern lowlands, which cover nearly half of the planet. The plentiful outcrops in the south have been interpreted as evidence that early Mars -- about 4 billion years ago -- had wet conditions necessary for producing phyllosilicates and possibly conducive to life.

The exposures in some northern craters suggest these minerals are in an older layer underneath the younger surface of northern Mars and are made visible where crater-forming impacts have exposed the underlying material. The new report by John Carter of the University of Paris and co-authors in the journal Science says that the northern finds suggest the ancient, wet conditions extended globally. Their report draws upon observations by the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM) aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and the OMEGA spectrometer aboard the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter.

Lyot spans 236 kilometers (147 miles) in diameter, centered at 50.5 degrees north latitude, 29.3 degrees east longitude.

This view of the crater combines mapping by NASA's Project Viking with elevation information from the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter instrument on NASA's Mars Global Surveyor orbiter. Annotations in Figure 1 indicate where hydrated minerals have been identified in observations by CRISM and OMEGA.

Photo credit: NASA/ESA/JPL-Caltech/JHU-APL/IAS